At the request of The Huffington Post, the Economic Policy Institute analyzed several surveys conducted by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics to measure black unemployment both before and after the recession.

The result: a veritable epidemic of joblessness that has undone decades of economic progress for millions of African Americans.

In Birmingham, Ala., the unemployment rate among African Americans was 5.3 percent in 2006, the year before the recession began. Last year it was 14.5 percent, according to the EPI analysis. In Miami, the rate went from 6.7 percent in 2006 to 17.2 percent last year. In the Los Angeles area, the black unemployment rate climbed from 8.6 percent in 2006 to 19.3 percent last year.

Meanwhile, in metropolitan areas where African American unemployment was already a major problem, levels now speak to a running depression. In Detroit, black unemployment last year reached 25.7 percent, more than four times the 6 percent mark seen in 2000 at the end of a technology-driven national economic boom. During the same decade, black unemployment in Las Vegas swelled from 8.2 percent to 20.1 percent, according to the EPI analysis.

In And the Band Played On, Randy Shilts' account of the beginning of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the U.S., public health physician Selma Dritz sighs to a reporter, "During the war with Napoleon, when Admiral Nelson asked for the numbers of men killed and wounded in a week of action, he said 'Let me have the butcher's bill for the week. ...I feel like I'm writing the butcher's bill of this epidemic." Like any epidemic allowed to run its course, while little effort is made to determine its cause or halt its advance, the epidemic of joblessness Ross chronicles holds terrible consequences for African-American families and communities.

When I interviewed him for this post, EPI's Austin itemized some of the "butcher's bill" for this epidemic.

The thing to keep in mind is that it's bad enough when anyone who wants to work can't find a job, and we now have millions of people who want to work and can't find jobs. We have understand the broad and social and economic harm, but there's also broad psychological harm. We have families that are under tremendous stress because they can't pay their bills, and can't provide for their children. We have children in families that are under tremendous stress. That stress in the family definitely affects children.

Also, high levels of unemployment and foreclosure mean children's lives are disrupted. They may be evicted, live in one place, and then move to another place, or to a homeless shelter. That's a tremendous disruption for children psychologically, and it also disrupts their education when they have to move from school to school. We know that all of this has sever negative impacts on children's long-term academic performance, and consequently their opportunities in the labor market going forward.

So we've seen very high levels of unemployment for 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011. And, because we're not doing enough in terms of jobs creation, 2012 and 2013 are going to look very similar for many African-Americans in many communities.

In any epidemic, it's disturbing to watch individuals and entire communities suffer the painful symptoms and ultimate destruction of the disease in question. But focusing on the symptoms and forgetting about the disease ensures that the epidemic will spread and destroy still more lives. That's why epidemiologists look beyond the symptoms, to identify the conditions that allow a disease to reach epidemic proportions.

Epidemics don't just happen. They require the right set of conditions in order to take hold. The current epidemic of African American unemployment didn't just happen either. By the time the market crashed and the economy went into recession, African Americans' financial "immune systems" were already weakened by economic "pre-existing conditions," allowing chronic unemployment to set in. After that, all that was needed for black unemployment to reach epidemic levels was a lack of intervention.

Leave a comment

We want to know your opinion on this issue! While arguing about an opinion or idea is encouraged, personal attacks will not be tolerated. Please be respectful of others.

The editorial team will delete a comment that is off-topic, abusive, exceptionally incoherent, includes a slur or is soliciting and/or advertising. Repeated violations of the policy will result in revocation of your user account. Please keep in mind that this is our online home; ill-mannered house guests will be shown the door.

The statistics cited by Terrance Heath verify that 'last hired, first fired' (1) is being applied with a vengeance in the current depression (2) but these horrific rates have been building for quite some time.

As a result of bipartisan efforts to export trade union jobs, the sole basis for the decades of relative prosperity from 1945 to 1975 hundreds of thousands of jobs were lost because of the deregulation and job export policies of Carter, Reagan and Bush1. With Bill Clintons signature on NAFTA and later on bank deregulation those losses numbered in the millions even before the current depression.

Under heavy attack by union busters from Reagan to Obama, trade union jobs dwindled to a small part of a the work force. The effects of the loss of those jobs in communications, transportation, auto, steel and consumer electronics hit Blacks and Latinos/Latinas especially hard, since they were almost the sole basis of prosperity in those communities.

There is a solution to mass unemployment but it's one that the lap dogs of wall street in the White House and Congress will never agree to. That would be a massive, multi-trillion dollar campaign to green industry, agriculture, transportation and the infrastructure utilizing union hiring halls. The funds to pay for that could be raised by applying a fair (90% - the tax rate on the rich in the Truman and Eisenhower administrations) tax on incomes and inheritances over $250,000.00, a total and complete withdrawal from Iraq, Afghanistan and South Asia combined with legislation demanding total and immediate repayment of the trillions in bailouts and handouts to banks, insurance and auto companies and to cover the losses of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

(1) Black male unemployment is shockingly high, rising from 16.7 percent to 17.3 percent. This compares to a rate increase of 8.8 percent to 8.9 percent for white males. In other words, black male unemployment is 94 percent higher than the rate for white men.

Black women also watched their unemployment rate rise from 12.9 percent to 13.2 percent, while white women saw no increase at all. Black women have an unemployment rate that is roughly 85 percent higher than white females.

If I start a company tomorrow that provides a service people want, and I make a 500% return on an initial investment of 250,000, what injustice to society did I commit that the government needs to rectify by taking away 90% of that hard-earned money?

If interest rates are highway robbery, what alternative mechanism do you propose to support the banking system?

Tarring? Those concepts are common enough ideas on the left. Democrats, who support capitalism, might think that taxing the rich at the same rate Truman and Eisenhower did, 90%, was more unfair than the mass poverty, unemployment and homelessness caused by the rich and the politicians they own - politicians like the Clintons, the Bushes and Obama but many don't. We consider mass unemployment to be an emergency.

As the events in Madison showed, the opinions of working people are undergoing a sea change on that question. It boils down to the question of whose side you're on, workers or owner-managers.

That change is centering on the role of Obama and the Democrats. Cornel West teaches in the Princeton Center for African American Studies and is a well know reformist socialist who supported Obama in 2008. Like the almost 30 million voters who abandoned the Democrats between 2008 and 2010, West changed his mind. In an article in AlterNet he's quoted as saying Obama "a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats. And now he has become head of the American killing machine and is proud of it."

"...I have been thoroughly misled, all this populist language is just a facade. I was under the impression that he might bring in the voices of brother Joseph Stiglitz and brother Paul Krugman. I figured, OK, given the structure of constraints of the capitalist democratic procedure that’s probably the best he could do. But at least he would have some voices concerned about working people, dealing with issues of jobs and downsizing and banks, some semblance of democratic accountability for Wall Street oligarchs and corporate plutocrats who are just running amuck. I was completely wrong.”

As for banks and other economic venues that required handouts from Obama because they weren't viable, they should be nationalized without compensation and run by councils representing workers and consumers. That economic democracy - socialism.

Plus, the high unemployment rate will be used to continue stupid stereotypes about "lazy blacks" who don't want jobs but want to be on government assistance, etc. No one will bother to put two and two together.